1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to the field of computer resource management, and in particular, to a system that manages resources in a processing system.
2. Related Art
Computers, embedded controllers, and other processing systems may include a number of finite resources. Such resources may include communication bandwidth resources, interrupt handling resources, mutexes, semaphores and other resources. The management of such allocatable resources may have an impact on the operation and/or efficiency of the processing system.
Some resource management approaches may implement a rigid partitioning scheme. In a rigid partitioning scheme, a resource may be divided into fixed-size chunks. A finite amount of the resource may be reserved to make that finite amount unavailable to other entities in a processing system. For example, processes may reserve portions of memory that they never use, at the same time causing a lack of free memory that blocks or delays other processes. A process may reserve access to all or a portion of an I/O device and thereby block access of the I/O device to other processes.
Other resource management techniques are clumsy and inefficient, solely reserving resources on a first-come, first-served basis without any regard for the effective operation of the processing system. Therefore, there is a need for an alternative system for managing system resources.